Manufacturing the Alien

I've been thinking on and off about aliens these days. One of the reasons must be because I'm on the CONTACT! listserve, which is fairly choc-a-block with speculations on Earth-like planets in other solar systems. The other has to with my research on other "aliens," those non-human agents that are more and more part of our everyday life.

Of course, it's odd to think about these "agents" (software or hardware) as "aliens" at all, but this is exactly what Morton Klass did in a 1983 essay of his I just re-read, "The Artificial Agent: Transformations of the Robot in Science Fiction" (Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 470 (171-179)). Klass spent much of his career as Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College (Columbia University). But his early career was one saturated in science fiction. As the brother of William Tenn (aka Phillip Klass), Morton Klass contributed several sf stories in the 1950s and early 1960s--several which subsequently were re-printed in anthropological science fiction collections like Leon Stover's Apeman, Spaceman.

In this essay, he tries to conjoin those two, otherwise distinct careers in a bit of speculative , cultural analysis on why we feel more comfortable with the alien we've manufactured (the alien we know?) than with the one we don't:

The robot in science fiction was portrayed at first as an alien and as a threat, but the danger was perceived as primarily an economic one--apart, that is, from the theological danger. The robot may drive us from our jobs and otherwise destroy our economic well being, it was felt; it may even threaten to destroy the world as we know it; it may endanger our collective soul. But we have never believed it would dishonour or corrupt us, something we have always assumed that our aliens wanted most of all to do. Perhaps not surprisingly then we seem to be able to live with whatever threat, economic or theological, the robots represent; we do not exhibit horror or revulsion, or even very much trepidation.

What strikes me about this passage is the fate of the robot today. Is it considered alien at all? Perhaps this is one of the reasons I found the movie version of I, Robot so unsatisfying: the robot today is hardly a figure of fear (at least to those people not being bombed by drones). I would even go further and say that the robot isn't really figured as a robot at all, if by that we mean some anthropomorphic, Capek-inspired robot. Instead, we have a wide variety of hardware and software agents that have seamlessly(?) extended our cognition, perception and sociality without actually demanding that we consciously recognize their alien autonomy from us. Of course, robotics labs manufacture extremely life-like robots, but these are not the ones that we encounter in our everyday practice. Our robots have faded into the (human) woodwork--as tools we use. Or, perhaps it's the case that we have become more alien, multiply supplemented by the artificial and hence no longer distinct from some intelligent 'Other".

"Circle" and the Spirit of Capitalism

There's a really interesting (or at least suggestive) story in May's issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction: "Circle," by George Tucker. Oh, it's got plenty of standard SF devices: Billy Black is a Seminole shaman who never seems to get hurt at the cursed construction site he's working on in Miami (a la the "Miami circle"). Eventually, he's hired on to "exorcise" the spirits from the site and, after a couple of complications, everyone profits: the condo complex goes up, complete with the cultural "value-added" of a seminole shaman and Billy can finally buy the plot to his grandfather's grave in order to stop developers from dis-interring his body . . .Kind of a Heinlein-esque-free-market-conquers-all story.

But, there's other things afoot here as well . . .The resolution of the story rests on Billy's realization that the "spirit of place" must be given recognition in order to be palliated. But what kind of recognition? Commodified recognition, occupying advertising and gallery space in the commodified topologiies of the new condo complex. This is certainly a prominent theme in contemporary anthropology: tracing the encroachment of commodities into ritual spaces, such as Laurel Kendall's 2008 article in american ethnologist examining the influx of global commodities in a Korean shaman's "kut".

But the question I had reading the story was: which spirit is being mollified? The spirit of space (genius loci) or the spirit of capitalism? In other words, the spirits that demand recognition are ultimately subsumed within another spirit: the spirit of perpetual, autochthonous growth, the ability of monster-developers like George Perez to develop Miami into a perpetual growth machine. Not the spirit of place, but the spirit of money.

But this is not just a case of commodification, wherein all forms of pre-capitalist culture become commodities to be bought and sold. Instead, the story gestures to more ghostly dialectics . . .one spirit in concert with another spirit. In the process, Tucker alludes to the what we can construe (not ironically) as the mystical trappings of the real estate boom, the sense that these commodities, animated by the spirits of capitalism, can generate endless, logarithmic growth. In another words, Tucker takes us to into the animism of the West.

CONTACT lives!

The word last year was that this wonderful, annual convocation of anthropologists, astronomers, artists, science fiction writers, visionaries and the occasionally wacky was on indefinite hiatus. But--they've met again at NASA-Ames, and the world is, I think, much better for it.

http://www.contact-conference.com/

Savage science fiction

It doesn't bear trying the number of science fiction stories juxtaposing hyper-trophied, Gernsback-ian technologies with highly stereotypical visions of gathering-hunting or pastoralist societies. And there's little evidence that this is a new trend--Wells's Time Machine, after all, devolved around the two, favorite Western tropes of the "primitive": the noble savage, basking about in a Dionysian prodigality (Eloi) and the rude savage (Morlocks), where, in the words of Hobbes, life is "nasty, brutish and short." One could say (and several have) that the "future" is only imaginable through this juxtaposition with the imagined savage. This, indeed, is what Christopher Bracken (in Magical Criticism) has suggested recently of Western discourse in general. And in a world where Western hegemony is tottering, there's been a renewed surfeit of these science fiction stories--shoring up the cracked foundations of modernity, as it were, with tales of genetically modified interplantary pastoralists quoting the Qur'an. But there are some bright spots as well.

For example, I very much liked (or, perhaps, liked to think about?) David Moles' short story, "Planet of the Amazon Women," starts off typically enough, with lots of allusion to Suzy Charnas (and to feminist utopia in general), with women on horseback, spontaneous conception, etc. Years after a temporally-induced "disease" has killed off all males on the planet Hippolyta, a male, scientist-mathematician makes his way to the planet and to the center of the temporal distortion that, we learn, didn't so much spawn a disease as replace one evolutionary timeline (sexual dimorphism) with another where it never developed. Our hero's goal: "to establish a metastable equilibrium that allows convex regions with real and virtual; histories to co-exist in four-dimensional space-time"--in other words, to "stabilize" these what-if kinds of gedanken into real-time possibility.

Of course, he succumbs to the disease in the end as well, but this ends up being the best thing about the story. As Moles' narrator concludes:

I was wrong to define my own history as real, Hippolyta's as unreal--to define mind as Self and Hippolyta's as Other. That is what the inference engines were trying to tell me.
There is no past that is not in some sense a lie. We see the past through the distortion of memory and imagination. We collaborate in its conscious distortion through history and propaganda. We see the laws of cause and effect violated not only each time a starship bends space-time but also each time we view the incomplete records of the past with our teleological modern eyes, imbuing them with presentiments of the future that is our own present. [ . . .]
The women of Hippolyta have a story they tell about themselves, and it does not include men.

There's a lesson here for both science fiction and representations of the West's many Others in general. When we tender these kinds of "savage" portraits of others, we introduce temporal distortions in the West . . .a kind of fragmentation of chronotypes as a by-product of attempting to (temporally) conquer the cultural Other.

All Tomorrow's Cultures: Anthropological Engagements with the Future by Samuel Gerald Collins
List Price:
$29.95
Product DescriptionHow will we live in the future? Are we moving towards global homogeneity? Will the world succumb to the global spread of fast food and Hollywood movies? Or are there other possibilities? In this book, Samuel Collins argues not only for the importance of the future of culture, but also stresses its centrality in anthropological thought over the last century. Beginning with the often times racist assumptions of 19th-century anthropology and continuing today in the work of anthropologies of emergent science, anthropologists have not only used their knowledge of present cultural configurations to speculate on future culture but have also used their assumptions about the future of culture to understand the present. About the AuthorSamuel Collins is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of Cultural Studies at Towson University. He researches globalization and information society in the United States and South Korea and has recently begun ethnographic research on multiagent systems composed of humans and robots.

Product Details
Hardcover: 144 pages
Publisher: Berghahn Books (February 1, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1845454081
ISBN-13: 978-1845454081
Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.6 inches